Monthly Archives: June 2017

The best-known examples of data journalism tend to be based around text and visuals — but it’s harder to find data journalism in video and audio. Ahead of the launch of my new MA in Data Journalism I thought I would share my list of the examples of video data journalism that I use with students in exploring data storytelling across multiple platforms. If you have others, I’d love to hear about them.

FOI stories in broadcast journalism

Freedom of Information stories are one of the most common situations when broadcasters will have to deal with more in-depth data. These are often brought to life by through case studies and interviewing experts. Continue reading →

When I began publishing Scraping for Journalists in 2012, one of the reasons for choosing to publish online was the ability to publish chapters as I wrote them, and update the book in response to readers’ feedback. The book was finally ‘finished’ in 2013 — but earlier this year I decided to go through it from cover to cover and update everything.

The result — a ‘second edition’ of Scraping for Journalists — is now live. Those who bought the first edition on Leanpub will already have access to this version.

The second edition includes new scrapers for different websites, and a new chapter on scraping APIs and handling JSON.

As always, I’ll be continuing to update the book, including any examples from readers (if you’ve used the techniques in the book for a story, I’d love to know about it).

A new anonymous blogging and commenting bot has appeared on the encrypted chat app Telegram — and it has some interesting potential applications for journalists.

Secretgram “helps you to create a post with anonymous comments in your Telegram channels and groups.” But it also appears to create a post that anyone can comment on anonymously — if they know the URL. Continue reading →

Every so often, an old story finds a new lease of life on a news website thanks to social media and the ‘most read’ stories panel. In the wake of the Paris terror attack, for example, social sharing caused a story about an attack in Kenya to begin trending — many of those sharing it didn’t realise that it had happened seven months earlier.

The problem is a symptom of the permanence of digital information. Old newspaper stories and broadcast bulletins never had to deal with this problem — but those organisations do now.